


to die for love (is to live by it)

by OurLostKingdom



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Angst with a hopeful ending?, Character Study, F/F, Five Stages of Grief, Grief/Mourning, Past Character Death, friends sharing tips about how to deal with the grief of losing the love of your life, i loooove them uggggh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:00:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27618731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OurLostKingdom/pseuds/OurLostKingdom
Summary: “When the colours gradually come back, even muted and pastel-like, Jamie wants to run. Wants to close her eyes and bury herself into the wound, plunge the knife deep where the skin is still pink and tender, bring back the blood, the tears and the weight on her chest. However painful and heavy, Dani’s loss is still Dani. It has her shape and her eyes, the familiar weight of her hands and the easy gravity of her body next to hers. Jamie hangs on to it like a drowning man lost at sea.”[Or: how ghosts linger and how Jamie learns to live with them]
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie, Jaime & Owen Sharma
Comments: 9
Kudos: 53





	to die for love (is to live by it)

**Author's Note:**

> I’d like to start by saying that these two properly broke my heart in pieces and I am so glad that they did. The giddiness was totally worth the tears, point thoroughly hammered by the series. So that’s def something.  
> I know that Jamie might appear a bit angry at the beginning, but you know, coping mechanism takes time to settle in so she’s allowed to be mad for a second before she gets to a relative inner peace. She’ll get there. But I do fundamentally understand the point Amelia made of “Jamie knows better than anyone that the pain of losing Dani was a fair price to pay for the joy of loving her” (I cried). She’s just sad guys. She lost the love of her life ffs. I’d be lying at the bottom of this fucking lake.
> 
> Also yes you can’t breathe that long under water. Bear with me. Thoughts happens faster than speech. 
> 
> Anyway. Enjoy.

_Oh, to lie side by side in the same tomb, hand in hand, and to gently touch a finger-tip from time to time in the darkness, would suffice for my eternity._

_(You who suffer because you love, love more than ever. To die for love is to live by it.)_

_x-x-x_

She can barely feel anything for an agonising moment, save for her heart beating furiously against her ribcage. Except it feels like it’s not quite in there anymore either. It neatly broke in half and now rests six feet under. She’s tempted to join it. Terribly so.

Numbness spread to her cheeks, her shoulders and her legs, right to her toes and Jamie almost doesn’t notice her lungs begging for air, fingers weakly stretching for the surface.

Water blurs everything around the edges but the sharp stab of anger brings back everything into focus. Sorrow follows its path, opens her up with surgical precision and rushes in to burrow itself in the vacant space where her heart used to beat.

She blinks. For a second, the fury and the grief breathing fire in her chest are enough to decide she never wants to see the surface of the earth ever again. Jamie thinks of drowning anyway because this burning in her chest is so much easier to bear than her fingers grasping for a body no longer here. So much easier than letting go. This burning she can live with. Surely she can die for it too.

But the effort it would take to come back to the surface, to drag herself to the shore and to let the shallow waters wrap their weight around Dani’s body until her very face wears away? That she can’t do. _Do not ask me to come back to the shore where you left me_. Do _not_ ask me.

(How do you leave this place anyway – what does the first next step look like – how do you go back into the world? How could you leave the space where you’re still losing but you haven’t lost completely just yet?

How do you come back from something like this? It feels like you’ve buried half of yourself in here, with her.

How could you possibly ever leave?)

All Jamie has left is an endless barren road in front of her, fading into nothingness and she can’t bring herself to care about what comes next. She wants to turn away, run in the other direction, back in time if she can. To last night, where she can beg Dani give them another day. To any other night of watching her sleeping peacefully on her shoulder, a soft breath against her collarbone and warm fingers on her waist. Mapping each freckle, star-like constellations against the ghostly white of Dani’s skin.

She’d walk in the jungle for a little while longer she thinks, Viola’s breath on her neck if she has to, just so she could get used to this, just so she could squeeze Dani’s hand one last time. So she’d get a chance at saying _thank you_ , and _please, stay_ and _I love you_ , _please it’s enough for me_. Please. _I’ll take her. I’ll carry her for you_.

(But that is the point isn’t? It wouldn’t be her hand anymore, is the thing that had scared Dani away the most in the end. But would _always_ be hers to Jamie. She’d find her anywhere, even engulfed in the hollowness of Viola’s face. Baby blue eyes over empty sockets. _And behind fate the all-surviving stars_.)

In the back of her mind, an old voice singsong with aching familiarity a refrain adults loved to spat at her face when she was a wee kid in foster care. She hates it just as much as she did back then. The mellowness of it. The hypocrisy of it all.

_Now darling, do you really think that is something your momma would have wanted for you?_

_It would make Dani so sad. And we don’t want her to be sad, right luv?_

Well, what fucking good does that do now? She didn’t want this for Dani either. She had much grander wishes for the both of them. Plans of far off holidays and more chances at getting lost together. She stood by her one day at a time alright. But even when you know your time is running out, it feels like forever as long as it’s not knocking on your door, isn’t?

And well. Nobody gets what they want, and _fairness doesn’t come into it_ _dear_.

(Jamie had always been fond of ‘buts’ and ‘fuck yous’ in general. Likes to think she’s been proving the world wrong since she’s been put in foster care and been told she’d never really make it out of it alive (she’s painfully aware of the parts of her that did not). It very much feels like she’s been giving the middle finger to fate for thirteen years, without much of a glance in its direction.)

But – and it’s the part that kills her, the simplicity of it all. She hadn’t asked for the moon – mostly she’d simply wished for some more time. A day or two maybe, or ten, or a thousand, she wasn’t being difficult. More ‘hello’s’ and late-night sleepiness, more of Dani’s warm hands on her own freezing limbs. And so much more lilies and begonias and stolen kisses behind the counter, when no one was looking. She hadn’t asked for the moon. Just Dani.

( _Just_. What a weird way to put it, when Jamie’s all too aware that she never did a single thing in her entire life to deserve a fragment of the affection Dani poured into her. That she had been incomprehensibly blessed for thirteen years, had been loved and had loved more that most ever get. But well, can you blame a girl? She got a taste of heaven, and was not ready to let it go).

x-x-x

But she does, laboriously. She gets back to the surface. Back to the land of the living. Because what else could you possibly do when someone sacrifice themselves for you? When they decide that it is better to go with a face that still feels like their own, rather than loosen their grip on their remaining sense of self? You don’t let it be vain, and she won’t insult Dani like that, not when she would have done the same thing in a heartbeat.

But, she loudly thinks, as if it could somehow reach her, _what do you think is waiting for me back here on the shore?_

And it’s not like Jamie doesn’t know. She knows it well. She knows very well, the same way she knew, _knows_ Dani’s every sigh and gasp, every smile, could trace them in her sleep. It came to her naturally, just like gardening had. She knows that leaving came from a place of love and care and pure, unadulterated selflessness.

And as broken sobs rack her body, she thinks that she also knows that Dani is not the one who has to do the living on.

(She has a faint memory of a foggy afternoon and snippets of a conversation with Hannah _(“losing yourself like that? Being worn away a little bit every day? Just shoot me”)_ and the irony of it all is almost too much to bear. She chokes and gasps, wonders if Dani felt the same cold terror when her lung filled with – _no_. She can’t think of Dani’s last moments, how terrified and _lonely_ she must have felt, or she’ll drown in sorrow too. But she measures the enormity of the gesture. Dani’s kindness wore down the stubborn walls of her own selfishness and here is what came out of it. A quiet form of understanding.)

Jamie gets her footing again, drags herself right where the land meets the water, but she can’t bring herself to cross the limit just yet. Can’t bring herself to look back into the depth of the lake to find Dani staring right through her again either. She’s stuck in a strange place between home and vagrancy. The only way is forward, but it only feels down.

She stays like this for a long time, water right above her waist, cold and shivering, and lets herself be terrified and furious and heartbroken. She feels like she’s twelve again, with all this grief and sorrow sitting on her chest, coiled in her throat. And nowhere to put it, nowhere to run. This anguish like a closed room, and the walls closing in, suffocating her.

x-x-x

_Jamie doesn’t remember much of the months that follow. Owen keeps a close eye on her, but she barely notices. She loses herself in the hours between dusk and dawn, barely eats, let alone sleep. Yet she feels like all she does is dreaming. The present becomes a forlorn reality. Estranged from her own body, she looks at it like one would look at animal in the zoo. Feels like a ghost herself, roaming aimlessly around the flat in search of something long gone, long forgotten. Wandering silently around the empty hallways of her memory, opening doors that lead nowhere, finding clues of a life she did not get to live. The past and present keep blipping out of existence, intertwining with one another until she can’t really tell where she is anymore. There are so many traces of a person that came before, leaving bloody footprints all around the place. She walks into them absentmindedly. Hopes she’ll soon be able to put a face on the silhouette that keeps eluding her, disappearing with a strange sort of smile when her fingers reach for the white gown in front of her._

x-x-x

She finds out many years later than the barren road is not all she has left. Flowers will grow anywhere, stubbornly, relentlessly, no matter how hard she might try to get rid of them at first. Funny lesson for a gardener.

But Dani sank in that lake, and with her the bright colours of Jamie’s life dimmed, until the world itself looked like an old muted shadow of itself. And it’s alright for a while, because she can’t bear the idea of a life that would go on undisturbed by the enormity of Dani’s loss. The world, she thinks, should feel unbalanced and deranged, tilted on its axis. Nothing should be right ever again.

And so when Jamie catches herself humming while tending at her flowers, smiling at Miles antics or Owen’s terrible puns, horror seizes her guts, heart coming to a full stop for a fleeting moment. Ice spreads through her ribcage, leaves her dizzy with shame and longing.

When a laugh escapes her, the whole fucking abyss threatens to swallow her whole. The shriek that comes out of her mouth is unfamiliar, a rattling sound that scratches her throat, shakes her insides like a sack of old bones, its sound closer to the breathy moan of pain of a grievously wounded creature. But it’s a laugh nonetheless, a realization that fills her with unspeakable dread, burns her lips with mortification. She can barely bring herself to look at any sort of reflecting surface for days on end after that, even when she’s only searching for a pair of unevenly matched blue eyes.

No one speaks of the guilt of living on despite the grief. It’s a confession that sounds too much like a betrayal.

_(To whom can I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved them less than you thought...?)_

So, when the colours gradually come back, even muted and pastel-like, Jamie wants to run. Wants to close her eyes and bury herself into the wound, plunge the knife deep where the skin is still pink and tender, bring back the blood, the tears and the weight on her chest. However painful and heavy, Dani’s loss is still Dani. It has her shape and her eyes, the familiar weight of her hands and the easy gravity of her body next to hers. Jamie hangs on to it like a drowning man lost at sea, fingers sealed around the wound. She doesn’t need anything else, and maybe more importantly, she doesn’t _want_ anything else.

x-x-x

Owen, unsurprisingly, is the one to give her the key.

They’re sitting on the edge of her small balcony, on a warm hazy night, spring just around the corner. The city keeps blinking in and out of her eye’s corner, the air heady from the roses’ perfume leaking out of her living room.

She never liked roses much. Too cliché and thorny for a rather dull kind of flower. But Dani liked them. _Likes_ them. Something about having to skin yourself a bit before getting to hold something pretty. Such a _Dani_ thing to say.

The lighter burns her fingers a little when she goes for another cigarette. Jamie inhales deeply, relishing in the smell of burnt tobacco that covers momentarily the unbearable sweetness of drying flowers. She glances at Owen’s back turned to her, legs outstretch on the railing, mirroring her own sloppy sprawling. His clenched shoulders are the only sign of the disquiet raging in his head. Yet he stands eerily silent, occasionally sipping on his wine, eyes glued to the heavens. It’s not exactly a recent development, this comforting quality of their shared silence, the intimate knowledge they have of each other’s sadness. Perks of sharing a much too similar grief she supposes. That’s how she recognizes the restlessness swirling behind his now closed eyelids. He is quiet these days, quieter than she ever knew him to be during their years at Bly. Silence had thickened around him, like moss around cold and unloved things. She reads him easily anyway. He never was one to hide convincingly. Even around Hannah, it was always so painfully obvious. It made it even worse.

She thinks of asking him what’s wrong, besides the obvious, but decides against it. They’ve grown to be slow creatures, both in gestures and in thoughts, something about living in two places at a time.

(There is a funny kind of reassurance in knowing she never really left Bly that day. In knowing Owen and she are still keeping company to Dani after all this time).

Words get clumsy, heavy with hidden meanings and grief, clinging to the roof of their mouth in a cumbersome sort of way. It’s been years now, but she’s all too familiar with the rawness that comes with heartbreak and the way it expends till there’s no room to breathe.

Like it’s the first day of the rest of their miserable lives all over again.

A constant shortness of breath.

And yet–

“Do you–”

Here it comes.

She turns her head again, feigning a casualness that she hopes gives space for his own thoughts.

“You know–”

Tries again, deep breath to steady himself. One last look to dying skies before looking down in her direction.

“You know she wants you happy right? That’s why – that’s why–”

He chokes up again. Clears his throat. Jamie would already be up and gone if it was anyone else, but it’s _Owen_. He’s not saying this thinking it will actually put a band aid on the wound.

“What I mean is – you’re allowed to, to,” he gestures widely around in an attempt to make his word come out without actually having to say them. “Live” he finishes lamely.

She raises an eyebrow before pointing out at her drink dancing precariously at the edge of her glass.

“Isn’t that what we’re doing here?”

The barest hint of a smile softens his features before disappearing again under the furrowing of his brow.

“You know what I mean”.

Her face grows serious, lips pinched in contemplation.

“Are you? Living? With all this?” it comes out more accusing than she intends it to be and she winces.

(Living. With this. It sounds like an oxymoron almost, and she’s never been one for all the literary bullshit. But it does. Living is a state of unrest, of change. There’s nothing permanent to it. Flowers are like that, constantly growing, expending and dying in an endless cycle. But this. Whatever _this_ is, it sits tight on her heart and doesn’t bulge. Doesn’t grow, doesn’t shrink. It’s both dreadfully silent and deafeningly loud. It doesn’t get more permanent than death. So, living with _this_?)

Owen shrugs in false helplessness. “I went to Paris, opened a restaurant I guess, which is not a small achievement if I may say so myself,” he sighs, looks away.

“Made some friends. Kept the old ones too, God knows why,” he winks at her mischievously, looking like a twenty years younger version of himself for a second. Jamie can almost picture him with an apron around his neck and her heart clenches painfully in her chest. She swallows it down and averts his eyes.

“Well I may not be a snobbish Parisian chef, but I _am_ celebrating the fifteen years of the Leafling next month so–”

“You could go elsewhere. You could come back – or leave this place and keep the shop even,” he interrupts her, sounding a bit frantic.

A beat.

She stares at him with something akin to horror frozen on the hard lines of her face.

“How could I?” she whispers, a strangled kind of sound at the back of her throat.

“You’re not – she’s not – it wouldn’t be like _that_ ” he hurriedly says, as if it suddenly makes more sense.

Jamie lets him find his word because she can’t get her own past the barrier of her lips.

“You’d take her with you” he finally manages, “She’s with you everywhere now. It’s not – you’re not leaving her behind by choosing to live somewhere else that fits better – that makes you happy.”

“There’s nothing waiting for me out there,” she can eventually utter out loud, even though it’s not exactly an answer, nor is it what she means. She means _I can’t_ and _she’s everywhere here, and it’s so much easier to bear weight than lightness_. And _I can do anger and grief but I’m not so sure about happiness anymore_.

But Owen knows anyway.

“But there is. So much of it. And even then love – you don’t have to hang on to all of this to feel her around you. Even if you stay, you don’t have to – you don’t have go on like you’re living on probation,”. He tries to lighten the mood because Jamie has never dealt well with emotionally loaded conversation. “Besides, I’m still waiting for you to pay me a visit and tell me what you think of the new name. I am very much waiting for you” he wriggles his eyebrows suggestively, laughter dancing in his eyes.

“Wouldn’t fancy waking up in your soggy French apartment mate” Jamie retorts dryly, with no bite to it.

His laughter rings clear as the rising sun. The night sets in.

“Not where I’m getting at, you prat”

Owen looks back at the darkening sky, thoughtful again.

“I guess the point I’m trying to make is… you don’t have to go and try so hard to make yourself more miserable when the real reason she’s still around is because you carry her with you. Pain’s not the thing tying you to her, it’s love. And as far as I’m aware, that won’t go away by merely laughing.”

He noticed. Of course he did. Probably why his puns are getting worse too, the idiot. Fondness spreads warmly in her chest and she huffs half-heartedly.

Silence settles around them. So does the cold, rising from below. The conversation is not over exactly, but whatever else that needs to be said, they don’t need words for it anymore. She takes a last drag out of her cigarette before woozily pulling herself on her feet. She stretches her hand toward him.

“C’mon mate. Time for you to crash on my couch and for me to open that third bottle.”

He wheezes, out of breath and stands up with an enthusiasm that sends him stumbling into her begonias. She glares at him before pushing him toward the living room.

“Care to share?”

Jamie hums noncommittally, the beginning of a smile forming at the corner of her mouth. She’s aiming for confident but the illusion shatters when she slurs her answer. Owen’s snicker follows her inside.

They fall gracelessly on the couch and as she reaches out for their third bottle of Château Sancerre, she swears she sees Dani’s silhouette leaning on the door frame, purple sweater and everything, smiling softly in her direction before vanishing into the shadows. She nearly falls over, but Owen steadies her with a laugh, and when she looks back again, there’s only darkness leading to her bedroom.

An odd sort of emotion settles in then, that quells the anger and sorrow that always seem to simmer in a dark corner of her soul. Melancholy maybe, a softer kind of grief, a sort of sadness that only comes after the feeling of a precarious happiness. She welcomes it, lets it linger. She doesn’t look at the door frame for the rest of the night.

(His words don’t set in for a while. It’s not like he told her anything she didn’t already know, _in theory_ , but to hear it coming from someone she knows bears as much as she does, it changes something. She doesn’t know what exactly. She just hears so much of Dani in the hopeful tone of his words. She left a mark on him too, she sometimes has to remind herself.)

x-x-x

Jamie doesn’t leave their apartment, or the shop. But she spends a month in Paris with Owen, before visiting the kids and Henry again with him. This time she doesn’t hold back her smile. Henry presses her shoulder when they leave, a wistful but proud expression hanging around the corner of his lips. He doesn’t say a word.

Very slowly, tentatively, like the world might go dark again if she gives in too much, she allows herself a chuckle, a snicker. And a full belly laugh at last, when Owen goes to sit down next to her on one of their yearly reunion, but trips over the feet of the table and falls head first in the couch. Food smears all over his shirt, wine spilled on the ugly red cushions she bought with Dani when they first got the place (flashes of a pout, and a half-hearted protest that goes nowhere and soft lips on her jaw to make up for it) and she won’t stop laughing. She can’t breathe for a minute and it’s the good kind. The kind that makes her feel more alive, that makes her head spin, star like dots dancing across her vision. She lets the image of a grown man gracelessly spread on her couch, cursing at the food sticking in his hair add itself to the compilation of mirthful memories she usually keeps so close to her chest. Lets the present leave its trace in the form of dark red stains on her favourite cushion. They look oddly similar to the ones she still has right under her collarbone that won’t leave, printed on her skin like an artistic rendition of her heartbreak.

Jamie finds herself looking over her shoulder every time her lips stretch into a crooked grin, can almost feel the ghost of a hand on her shoulder, squeezing reassuringly. She dreams of Dani telling her that she had missed seeing her smile and wakes up slightly disorientated but unexplainably elated. She almost burst into tears when she chokes on Flora’s first try at tea and it is as disgustingly bitter as it was when Dani made it. She loves it.

Love, she finds out, doesn’t care much for the linearity of time. It hangs on to every little thing, as long as she is willing to pay attention. Memories linger on to the curve of Flora’s smile and Owen’s gentleness, in the delicate curl of the moonflowers petals she manages the nurture back to life again. And love does too.

On days where she misses Dani so godamn much – which is pretty much every minute of every day – she tries to remember that. There is no without. She goes out, onto the roads they once roamed together hand in hand, and she feels the phantom of her presence in the way the gentle autumn light kisses her skin and the breeze wraps itself around her shoulders with unexpected warmth. She can almost make out her silhouette lying on the grass, a cheeky grin plastered across her face. Looking for people really does put them with you she thinks, and it’s a comfort. Dani’s ghost is one she can live with – and she finds an odd sort of solace in being haunted, there is a bittersweetness to it that makes it easier to breath, that comes with the knowledge that she’ll never be left alone ever again.

_(for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more)_

Every living thing grows out of every dying thing anyway (and for a while Jamie hates that she ever said that to Dani of all people), and it becomes effortless to feel her presence. Lightness gets easier to bear – it doesn’t erase the multitude of ways Dani carved herself into her life. Her density does not lessen, and Jamie stops feeling like she’s leaving her to drown a second time when she snorts at Owen’s horrible jokes.

(It remains a strained sound in the back of her throat, but there was a time where laughing was out of the cards. She’ll take what she has. A weird feeling in her chest tells her that Dani loves it anyway.)

Every living thing grows out of every dying thing she reminds herself, words sticking in her mind for hours on end, like a song that never goes out.

And just like that, flowers grow around the wound. She finds Dani in all of them.

x-x-x

_“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”_

**Author's Note:**

> This is it! Jamie alone for the rest of her life kept bugging me, and what Mike said kept bugging me, and what Amelia said kept bugging me so that’s just my way of coping I guess x) but she’s there guys, she’s there even if we can’t see her, it’s ok!
> 
> Thanks a lot for reading, constructive criticism is deeply appreciated as always, and shout out to all of you guys creating content, writing fanfic, making gifs etc, I see you and I am living for this. They are so soft, it’s killing me. I just had to write a bittersweet side of the story for cathartic purposes.
> 
> Come yell at me incoherently on Tumblr (broken-jaw-of-our-lost-kingdom), where I’m slowly turning into a thobm blog against my better judgement :) (maybe I don’t have a better one). Cheers! (and man, what a year this week has been yeah?)
> 
> Featuring, in order of appearance:  
> Les Misérables, Book V – Victor Hugo  
> Letter to Karl and Elisabeth von der Heydt – Rainer Maria Rilke  
> Mourning Diary, 28 of November entry – Roland Barthes  
> Letter to Georges de Lauris – Marcel Proust  
> The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera


End file.
